Thursday, December 28, 2017

I was in college when
the first GMO seeds were made available to farmers. These were Round
Up resistant soybeans invented by Monsanto. The trait was licensed to
other seed companies too and in just a few years, such seeds became
the standard for most soybean acres in the United States. A few years
later the first GMO corn seeds became available too. The corn was
given Round Up resistance, but also around the same time, another
engineered trait that allowed the corn plant to produce its own
insecticide, Bt.

My father and I adopted GMO soybeans
right away. It is easier to have one herbicide plan that applies to
all soybeans acres, especially if a herbicide that can be sprayed on
only GMO soybeans with that resistant trait would kill soybeans
without it. That could be a costly mistake. The switch to Round Up
resistant soybeans immediately simplified our herbicide plans for
soybeans. It was much easier and cheaper to have a field of soybeans
that was clean of weeds. Yields went up. In the intervening years as
both the conventional breeding programs and engineered traits have
been improved, yields of soybeans have continued to climb.

I was a late adopter of GMO corn. For a
few years I continued to grow conventional corn hybrids and sell them
for a bonus as non-GMO corn. But as the hybrids with engineered
traits continued to improve, the math no longer favored growing
non-GMO corn. The loss of potential yield more than made up for the
paltry bonus being paid for selling non-GMO corn. So I too switched
to Round Up resistant, engineered hybrids that also produced their
own Bt insecticide. As with soybeans, the yields went up and have
continued to trend upwards as both the breeding programs and
engineering have been improved.

Both corn and soybean acres in the
United States are overwhelmingly GMO these days. These varieties of
soybeans and hybrids of corn are far more reliable crops than their
non-GMO alternatives. Part of this is that the conventional breeding
programs for all the major seed producers are focused on providing
the best lineages to be further modified by genetic engineering. But
a large part of this is that the engineered traits themselves boost
yields, increase the crop's resistance to drought, disease, and
pests, and open up methods of weed control to farmers that allow us
to better control weeds. All of that increases the yield we can
reliably expect.

Whether or not the plant is GMO,
whatever herbicides are used will eventually become less effective
because the weeds are under tremendous selective pressure to evolve
resistance to that herbicide. This played out in the 70s and 80s as
herbicides in common use became less effective, leading to the
development of GMO crops that could then be sprayed with herbicides
that the weeds weren't resistant to. Well, that is happening again
now. Round Up is getting less effective. So new soybeans are being
developed that can resist other herbicides in addition to Round Up to
reduce weed pressure in fields. It is an arms race of sorts,
between the genetic engineers and the evolution of weeds. But so far,
the scientists are winning, at least in my region where our harsh winters keep our weed pressure less than our neighbors in southern
states.

I want to mention something else with
regards to GMO seeds, the rumor that farmers get sued by seed
companies. Where this idea comes from is that prior to GMO soybean
seed, farmers tended to keep a little of their soybean grain to use
as seed for the following year's crop. Soybeans aren't hybrids like
corn, and what is planted will be reproduced, just in much greater
quantities. With GMO seeds, farmers signed an agreement in order to
buy the seed saying they wouldn't do that with their GMO seed/grain.
A tiny minority of farmers cheated and got caught. An even smaller minority took advantage of cross
pollination and kept for seed only the grain produced from the rows
of their soybeans closest to rows of GMO soybeans – in the hope
that after a few years of doing so, they would have seed with reliable GMO traits,
without having had to pay for it.

Another persistent rumor is that idea
that seed companies insert genes that prevent farmers from planting
as seed the grain they harvested the previous year. This too is bunk.
With corn the barrier is due to hybridization which has been around
for 100 years, so there is no need for a so called terminator gene.
With soybeans, the fact that a soybean seed makes many copies of
itself that could be planted the next year is why farmers sign
agreements saying they won't do that in order to buy the seed in the
first place. Such agreements wouldn't be necessary if the grain was
sterile, not to mention that producing the seed in the first place
would be difficult or impossible if the soybean plants only produced
sterile seeds.

I like GMO crops. I like that they can
be made to produce reliably good yields under various stresses from
drought to disease to pests. I like that they allow farmers to use
herbicides that are far less toxic to humans than those in common
usage in the 70s and 80s. I like that I haven't sprayed any
insecticides on my corn in many years, because the plant takes care
of that itself by producing the Bt toxin, the same bacteria derived
toxin that organic farmers have used for decades as an insecticide
spray. I like that genetic engineering provides ways of introducing
traits into crops in a relatively fast, predictable way and that such
traits can be removed too if a problem develops. And I have hope for
the future, that engineered traits will continue to keep yields of
many food crops reliable as climate change alters agriculture while
the global population continues to grow.

I'm interested to see what CRISPR/cas9
enables crop scientists to do in the future. As far as I know they
haven't used that technology to produce any of the developments we've
seen in GMO crops so far. It takes years for a new GE trait to work
its way through the regulatory process to the point that it produces
a seed that I can buy. But such a precisely targeted gene editing
tool ought to produce some interesting traits for future crops.

Corn is a plant related to grasses that
comes from an ancestor indigenous to Central America called teosinte.
It was domesticated many centuries ago, long before Europeans came to
this continent, and through selective breeding the very grass-like
teosinte became what we call corn. Its selective breeding continued,
adapting it for the climates of central North America and it appears
to have been the main energy source for the mound building cultures
of the Mississippi and its tributary river valley cultures. Those
ancient mid western farmers skillfully adapted corn to this
environment and their contemporaries in other regions borrowed the
technology making corn an important staple food crop of many Native
American cultures.

By the time people of European decent
were settling as farmers in what would become the corn belt of
America, corn had already been well adapted and productive for the
region for a long, long time. But these seventeenth century mid
western farmers didn't grow corn exclusively. They brought many
different crops with them as well as livestock to raise in what were
largely isolated communities that needed to be self
sufficient. But corn just grew very well here and even though farms
in this region would remain fairly diversified in crops and
livestock, almost from the start they grew a lot of corn.

For the effort, corn produced a lot of
food. It thrived in the soil and climate of the mid west more
consistently than European crops like wheat or oats or barley. As
well it should have, being indigenous and a product of countless
generations of adaptation and improvement. By the early 1900s, corn
was already taking up a sizable percentage of the tilled acres of
cropland and accounting for an even larger percentage of total grain
production. And into that near dominance came a new technological
development, hybridization.

Corn hybrids are plants that result
from seeds that are produced by tightly controlling which plants get
pollinated by what pollen. How this works is that a genetic lineage
is developed to be the seed producing female plant and a different
lineage of plants is developed to be the male pollinator. The female
plants need to have their tassels removed by hand and the male plants
need to have their ears segregated at harvest time. But the resulting
hybrid seed from the female plants will grow a plant the following
year that greatly out produces what either parent's lineage could.
But a by product of this is that the resulting corn kernels don't
make more of this super seed they came from, and are no better than
either parent plant, maybe worse.

Farmers had since time immemorial kept
the best grain they grew to use as seed for the next year's crop.
Even corn had always before been that way. But now there was a new,
much more complicated way to get corn seed, that involved special
seed producers and multi-year processes to sell farmers hybrid corn
seed. And despite the disadvantages, this was quickly adopted because
the increase in yield and other positive traits was dramatic. As
hybridization programs became more sophisticated and practiced, corn
yields kept going up. Making corn far, far more productive per acre
than other crops, leading it to take over as the dominant crop in the
region.

The mechanization of agriculture
happened simultaneously and by the time we get to the 1960s a
generation of mid western farmers had seen farming transformed from
being very similar to the way farms had operated for centuries into
the beginnings of the highly specialized, high tech businesses of the
modern age. That is to say, my dad has in his lifetime seen farming
be powered by horses and intense manpower to raise several different
livestock species and several different crops as feed, food, and
grain for cash sale into what I do, which is raise only two crops,
with no livestock, using GPS guided machinery to farm with only one
other person helping me a number of acres that used to take at least
fifty people and many horses to do when my father was a child.

But how did corn grow from being an important crop to the overwhelming majority crop in the region in less than 100 years? The aforementioned hybridization of corn was important and so was the
mechanization of the work. Artificial fertilizers and herbicides,
which happened in the later half of the 1900s also helped. These various factors taken together this meant that farmers growing corn were more productive,
more profitable. All of this corn they grew made livestock cheaper to
raise for meat, which raised the demand for meat among an
increasingly urban and rapidly growing population. Which insured a
steady market for corn, so even more could be grown and sold. Those regions
that grew corn especially well, did. Those that couldn't grew the
crops being abandoned by farmers in the corn belt. And regional
specialization was established. Which actually helped farmers become even better skilled at what they grew, becoming multi generational experts
and that too boosted productivity.

What I've done above is greatly simplify
and condense thousands of years into a few paragraphs. And although
I'm confident in my description, there are many factors that I've
omitted or don't even know about, because their effects on events are comparatively minor. But I can assure you that far more well informed
and educated people than I have written detailed analyses that don't
gloss over or ignore various facts. I'd encourage anyone interested
in more information to reach out to the Cooperative Extension
Services of mid western Land Grant Universities.

That is how we got where we are, but
why does it stay that way? Why is corn still the king? Well, because
all the advantages it has historically had remain true. I could grow
oats instead of corn and there are types of oats available to me that
would grow pretty well here. Most of my machinery and agronomic
practices would switch over to oats production well enough so that I
wouldn't need to replace all of my equipment. But the end result is
that I'd be less profitable and less financially stable. And selling
all those bushels of oats I'd be producing would be harder than
selling corn or soybeans.

As farmers became specialized in a
given region, the infrastructure they use to sell, store, and deliver
their grain became specialized too. Throughout the mid west there is
a huge and tremendously expensive network of corn handling businesses
and equipment that serve to connect the corn grown with the users of
it. In my region these businesses are set up to handle vast
quantities of corn and soybeans. It is easy to deliver grain to them,
year round. This is especially important during the harvest, when it
is vital that a semi truck load of grain be emptied and returned to
the field quickly so the combine harvester can continue to work
uninterrupted, every minute counts.

There is so little demand for non-corn
(or soybean) grain regionally that there is little to no
infrastructure to handle it. If I were to grow rye or barley or some
other specialty grain instead, I might have to drive that grain to a
facility that is hours away instead of minutes, assuming I could even
find a buyer at all. In my region there is a little bit of wheat
grown, an insignificant percentage of acres. But it can only be
delivered to river terminals, not to most local grain elevators, and then
only on a few scheduled days of the year. Likewise, a tiny number of
acres are used to grow pumpkins for pie fillings, but this is by
contract with canning factories only. The thing is that the regional
market has about as much not-corn and not-soybeans as it wants right
now and it isn't worth the risk of livelihood for all but a tiny
minority of farmers in my region to grow anything else.

So how did soybeans find a niche in the
corn belt when so many other crops were pushed out? Crop rotation has
always been a valuable practice to farmers. It helps control weeds
and pathogens. It allows some diversification of crop characteristics
and weaknesses which mitigates risk. But in the age of hybrid corn,
if farmers were to give up some profitability to have a rotation
crop, they wanted to get something out of it beyond the traditional
advantages of rotation. What they got was the nitrogen fixing legume,
the soybean. Corn, especially high producing hybrid corn, needs a lot
of nitrogen fertilizer in the soil. Farmers can get this from
livestock manure but as grain farmers became specialized and gave up
raising livestock, that fertilizer source wasn't readily available anymore.
Artificial fertilizers were becoming easier to obtain in the later
half of the twentieth century and that was a big help, but so too was
a new grain imported from Asia, the soybean. Here was a rotation crop
that not only grew well in the corn belt and was worth something to
sell, but it also left nitrogen in the soil that a corn crop could
use the following year, for free.

Not every corn farmer adopted soybeans
on sizable numbers of their acres, but enough did that the grain
became established in the corn belt and therefore it had the
infrastructure and markets available to sell it as easily as corn.
That remains true today, especially in Illinois which is the number
one soybean producing region in the world.

You might notice that throughout this
wall of text, I have not once mentioned any manipulation of farmers
or consumers by big agricultural companies like Monsanto or ADM. The
reason is simple. Corn was king long before those companies existed.
They are not in any way responsible for the creation of regional
specialization in agriculture, though they and many other companies
have plugged themselves into the infrastructure and profited from the
system. I personally don't think they do anything to manipulate the
system to keep things as they are either, since such influence is
unnecessary, based on all of the factors I wrote about above. Without
multiple, permanent, catastrophic disruptions to supply and demand,
corn will continue to be the major cash crop of the mid west for the
foreseeable future.

We might be tempted to name human
caused climate change as just such a disruption, but I doubt it. Not
that I doubt the science of climate change, no, I'm a liberal,
science nerd and I accept the fact of human caused climate change.
But even the more pessimistic models I've seen and understand won't
stop corn production in my region. Farmers here will just use corn
hybrids with different relative maturity ratings to take advantage of
the longer/warmer growing season, the corn belt will shift north, and corn production will continue.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

I've seen Star Wars: The Last Jedi
twice now. When I left the theater the first time, on opening night,
I was uncertain about how I felt about what I'd just seen. After a
few days and some thinking about it, I watched it again, in a much
less crowded and raucous theater. I believe I have some clarity in my
thoughts and feelings about this latest Star Wars movie.

What follows will contain spoilers. If
you haven't seen it yet and don't want to be spoiled, stop reading.

I went out of my way to avoid spoilers
before my first viewing. I went into the theater thinking I was
prepared to be a blank slate, ready to just watch the movie without
preconceived ideas. I was wrong. On some level I was expecting a
movie that was thematically and structurally similar to The Empire
Strikes Back. Even the movie trailers led me into that false
prejudice. Throughout that viewing I was continually off balance,
over and over expecting one thing and getting something else.

When we left the theater I said to my
wife that although I liked the movie, it felt off somehow. It was
Star Wars, but maybe the pacing, humor, archetypes, etc. were wrong
somehow. Maybe not as jarring as the recent Star Trek movies, which
really don't feel like Star Trek at all, despite the excellent
performances of the actors revising original franchise roles. But
perhaps a hint of that sort of complaint.

After thinking about it and seeing the
movie a second time, I've developed a different or perhaps more
nuanced impression. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is not The
Empire Strikes Back, but it is
definitely a good Star Wars film. It takes some archetypes,
tropes, and themes that we have come to expect from the franchise and
twists them about somewhat, not into anything unrecognizable, but
enough to make us readjust what Star Wars is and can be.

Let me elaborate on that. Star Wars
conditions us to expect heroic, capable good guys and villainous,
usually uncomplicated bad guys. But within minutes of the start of
the film, Poe, the heroic pilot, makes a terrible decision that costs
a lot of lives on a splashy but foolish attack. And he continues that
sort of behavior almost all the way through the film, being brash and
wrongheaded all the way up to fomenting a mutiny. And with Kylo Ren,
we get a deepening of his complexity, humanizing him to us, and
teasing us with hope that he'll redeem himself, while still setting
him on a path to being the real bad guy of this trilogy. Rey and Luke
both subvert our expectations too, with Luke being cranky and
disinterested in being a hero, and Rey being no body, unhindered by
some multi generational legacy of the Force, and therefore a profound
symbol of hope because if she can be a champion of the Light, so can many others.

But because of these tweaks to our
expectations, the film puts the viewer off balance. The movie doesn't
affirm the patterns we've come to expect in a Star Wars story, it
subverts them. It made me wonder then, what was the central theme? I
think it is mistakes and growth. More than The Force Awakens, this
movie is the one that serves as the hand off from one generation to
another. New characters, be they heroes or villains, are being
set up to become the prime movers and shakers of the plot and the future
of Star Wars.

I
think perhaps my favorite parts of the movie were the interactions
between Rey and Kylo. Through much of the film they were
communicating with one another via the Force and in those
conversations we really get a much better picture of who Ben Solo was
and why Kylo Ren thinks as he does. But beyond that, the performances
of the two actors was just fantastic. Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley
were both a joy to watch in those scenes, conveying many layers of
emotional subtlety and range with definite chemistry, all the way up
to their climactic battle. That fight scene is quite possibly my
favorite of any in any Star Wars movie. I was really pulled right
along the emotional journey leading up to Rey and Kylo fighting
cooperatively and then turning on one another. It was just brilliant.

Oh,
Carrie Fisher, how I will miss you. Her performance was also
excellent and it was really neat to see how she developed her own
connection to the Force and unconventional way to use
it. Her interactions with Holdo and Luke were so bittersweet, especially given Carrie's untimely death. Her tutelage of Poe was so inspiring. She was every bit the
Princess and General that clearly commanded so much respect among her
people.

Poe
and Finn were both entertaining and funny. I will continue to look
forward to seeing them in the next movie. And upon second viewing, I
actually don't think the casino plot line was bad at all or disrupted
the pacing nearly as much as I thought during the first viewing. Probably because I kept wanting and expecting Empire. Yeah, it isn't the strongest part of the movie, but it had memorable scenes and
character interactions. It also gave us the character Rose, who was a
delight.

Lastly a bit more on Luke and on Mark Hamill's performance, I totally did not expect a
single thing that happened with Luke or the way he behaved. More than
any other thing, the Luke scenes utterly disrupted my expectations
and I can't be happier about it. Really. Luke was right, the Jedi
are/were deeply flawed. The Force doesn't belong to the Jedi or the
Light or anyone. Mark really brought this version of Luke to life,
this haunted and cranky but not broken or hopeless man. He was great.
Luke was great.

And
you know what? The movie was great. It used familiar material in ways
we know and subverted some of it in bold ways to tell a nuanced and
interesting story. It answered some questions and made others
unimportant as it worked through its theme of mistakes and growth,
handing off the story to a younger generation of entertaining,
imperfect, interesting characters. I can't wait to see how this
trilogy is wrapped up in Episode IX.

Saturday, October 7, 2017

The United States of America has a gun
violence problem. People are injured or killed via guns at a much
higher rate here than in any other western nation. At root this is
because there are so many guns here, owing to our very lax gun
control laws and resulting in nearly one gun for every citizen. These
facts make getting guns easy, both legally and illegally. Some of
those many guns will be used for nefarious reasons and even if it is
a tiny minority, that still accounts for our very high gun violence
rates.

In recent years and with alarming
frequency America has suffered some highly publicized mass shootings.
Most recently a man killed over fifty people and wounded hundreds
more in Las Vegas. A single man armed with semi automatic rifles
modified to fire very rapidly did that, not a team of highly trained
killers, a single man with no history of such behavior and at the
time of this writing no known motivation.

It is a sad truth that in a society as
large as ours there will be some small number of people who want to
commit mass murder for twisted or unfathomable reasons. I cannot
pretend to have any deep insights into the minds of these men or ways
in which to preemptively redirect their energies in less destructive
ways. Though I do hope there are people far more intelligent and well
informed working on that. However, I do think there are ways we can
make it far more difficult for them to kill so many people. It is
time to severely restrict access to the kinds of firearms that are
capable of the volume of fire that can allow a single man to kill so
many people in such a short time.

I propose that semi automatic, magazine
fed rifles and carbines should no longer be available to consumers.
There should be a voluntary federal buy back program in place that
will buy such weapons from their present owners to be destroyed. That
such weapons that have already been sold can continue to be owned and
shot by their present owners, but cannot be sold or given away to
anyone else, and must be turned in to be destroyed within one year of
the death of their present owners if said owners didn't already take
advantage of the federal buy back program.

This would do little to reduce small
scale gun violence in America and I don't claim that it will.
Robberies and other such crimes tend to be committed with the use of
handguns, not semi automatic rifles. Likewise this is unlikely to
have much affect on gun suicides. But what this restriction is
intended to do is reduce the body count of mass shootings like what
just happened in Las Vegas by reducing the availability of weapons
capable of sustained high rates of fire. Over time, this restriction
will virtually eliminate such weapons from civilian ownership in
America.

Monday, August 14, 2017

It wasn't that long ago that people (outside of tiny fringe groups) would have been too ashamed to march openly in favor of white supremacism. I was in college when the OJ Simpson trial and verdict stirred up a lot of racial tension and I have no doubt that there were plenty of white people who harbored racist views. But they did not march and they were not open about these views in public, because they rightly knew that to do so would have made them pariahs. Not anymore, when young, angry, openly racist, openly white nationalist, openly NAZI sympathizing, white men can march on a college campus carrying torches without shame or fear of social consequences. I find this deeply disturbing.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

What is an assault weapon? Competing
and sometimes mutually exclusive answers to that question seem to be
driving a lot of debate and misunderstanding between gun control
advocates and gun enthusiasts. Discussions about this can often end
up being dismissed as a fight about what a gun looks like or how a
gun labeled as an assault weapon is really just the same as other
guns that share its caliber if not its design. I think that kind of
thinking is missing a bigger picture.

So here is how I draw a distinction
between assault weapons and sporting guns, an assault weapon is a gun
designed to be a modern weapon of war or is directly derived from a
modern weapon of war and therefore shares a significant number of
parts with current military weapons. It isn't the magazine capacity, caliber,
or shape that makes an assault weapon different from a sporting gun.
It isn't judging a gun by some sort of checklist of features that if
it has too many of them, it then gets an assault weapon label. The
answer to me is in why it was designed, for what original purpose,
and its relationship to military weapons that should matter.

A hunting or sporting rifle might have
the same caliber as a current military rifle, but the hunting gun has
a very different evolution of design. It cannot be remade with the
replacement of a few parts into modern military assault rifle.
Whereas an assault weapon like an AR15 is in almost every way,
exactly the same as a front line, modern, military rifle, except that
it cannot fire fully automatically without replacing a few small
parts inside the action. It is the similarity of design, capability,
and the sharing of parts with the military versions that makes such a
gun an assault weapon.

I personally own a rifle that fires the
same ammunition as the main assault rifle of the US military, 5.56mm
or .223 caliber. My rifle shares nothing else in common with the
Army's M4 carbine. Mine is a bolt action rifle that requires the
action be manually operated between shots to eject a spent case and
chamber a fresh round. It cannot fire in a fully automatic way. It
cannot even fire in a semiautomatic way. I cannot possibly use it to
spray 30 or more bullets in just a few seconds or hundreds of bullets
in a minute or so. Because my rifle was never designed to put out
that kind of firepower or to kill dozens of people in a few seconds,
the M16, AR15, and M4 were and can. So, I'm not bothered by
restricting their use to the military, along with many other
powerful, deadly weapons of war.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Well, I think we've met our next
Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch. From what I've read about him,
he is very much like Justice Scalia who's seat he will take. So,
he'll be very conservative on a wide variety of issues and the
opportunity to lean the court further to the left has almost
certainly been lost. I know that many will consider this unfair,
given that the only reason President Trump is getting this chance to
replace Scalia is because Republicans blocked President Obama's
nominee for nearly a year. And, although I agree, it isn't going to
matter. Democrats will not return the favor. There are a few reasons
for that.

Democrats aren't going to be able to
block this nomination for years waiting for another President or
shift in power in the Senate. It's one thing for Republicans to hold
things up while the Presidential primaries and general election
played out. It is quite another matter to force a Supreme Court seat
to remain vacant for at least two years and maybe four. Democrats
just won't garner enough public support to maintain that kind of
resistance for that long on the hope that they'll retake the Senate
and the Presidency during the next four years.

Blocking Gorsuch could mean spending
all of their public support and then not having enough to block
whoever President Trump nominates next, someone who could be far less
qualified or even far more conservative. President Obama nominated
centrist in the hopes that by not insisting on a strongly liberal
nominee that the Republicans would go along with things and the Court
would move a little left. Instead of a centrist President Trump has
nominated a Scalia clone that would keep the Court similar to the way
it was before Scalia died. The Court is not going to move left under
a Republican President and Senate, but at least Gorsuch isn't a swing
further to the right.

Lastly, Democrats won't stubbornly
block filling the Supreme Court because they are actually concerned
with governing and keeping the essential functions of government in
operation. Unlike some Republicans, Democrats aren't trying to create
dysfunction as a justification to shrink government down to the point
where it could be drown in a bathtub. By and large, Democrats believe
in good governance and do not want to be accused accurately of acting
in bad faith. They just aren't on the whole philosophically inclined
towards long term, obstinate disruption for the sake of it. Because
that sort of thing doesn't resonate well enough with their base. A
base who often interprets government shutdowns and gridlock as
failures not tactics.

None of this is to say I am happy about
this nomination. There are a number of issues in which I disagree
with Judge Gorsuch, based on his past rulings. I have no reason to
expect that he will, once seated, move to the left. And so given his
age, he will likely be a reliable conservative voice on the Supreme
Court for decades to come. But going forward, it is the other seats
on the Court that matter. Which means the 2018 and 2020 elections are
very important. Democrats must gain and hold a majority in the Senate
and retake the Presidency or the next Justices replaced will move the
Court far to the right.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

I am writing to you as one of your
constituents to implore you to speak out. President Trump has gone
too far with his executive orders on immigration and it is not enough
for only Democrats to oppose him. Republicans like yourself must
stand up to his behavior as well. It is not just unconstitutional for
the President to issue immigration restrictions that are blatantly
discriminatory against religious groups, but it is contrary to the
very bedrock principles that have made our country a shining beacon
of hope, equality, and freedom – principles that when we fail to
live up to them are great stains on our national honor.

In the dark days leading up to World
War Two, America turned away from its shores Jews who were fleeing
for their lives from the Nazis. It was done out of racism, fear, and
misbegotten ideas of American purity. Many of those refugees who were
turned away ended up murdered in Nazi death camps. America was wrong
then, to our everlasting shame, and we would be just as wrong to
allow President Trump to turn away refugees of any faith fleeing for
their lives now.

We stand at a point in history where we
can chose not to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can still be a
beacon of hope, equality, and freedom. But we must act, regardless of
party or political leanings, to prevent the Trump administration from
subverting our laws and best traditions – from turning away people
who are running from genocidal monsters. Your constituents are not so
hardhearted as to condemn another group of refugees in need our
compassion to deprivation and death. I hope you aren't either. So add
your voice to the millions of other Americans who are opposing these
immigration restrictions.